Explain that this poem of William Shakespear is sonnet. examples from the poem that illustrate the characteristics its type (sonnet)Shakespearean Sonnet
Sonnet - Shall I compare thee to a...

Explain that this poem of William Shakespear is sonnet. examples from the poem that illustrate the characteristics its type (sonnet)

Shakespearean Sonnet

Sonnet - Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate:Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer's lease hath all too short a date:Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;But thy eternal summer shall not fadeNor lose possession of that fair thou owest;Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou growest:So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

The "poem" "Shall I Compare Thee..." is an Elizabethan sonnet, as were all of Shakespeare's sonnets. (This form is also known as the "Shakespearean" sonnet.)

The rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. (The rhyme between the first and third lines is called a "near rhyme.")

Shakespeare uses the structure (3 quatrains and a rhyming couplet) to organize the poem. Often the first two quatrains present the basic premise of the poem, in this case, how the subject of his poem is as beautiful as a summer day—even with the idea in mind that those summer days can often times be diminished by winds or the change of the season.

Structurally, the "shift" of the poem's focus comes at the start of the third quatrain, easily spotted by the word "but." (You can see the same word used as the sonnet's turning point in Sonnet #29.) In this quatrain, the bard says that while a summer day will fade, her beauty (the woman he is speaking to) will never diminish.

The rhyming couplet serves as the conclusion to the sonnet, where the author sums up the major focus of his previous twelve lines: that as long as men breathe and their eyes still are able to see the poem, her beauty will live on—in essence, forever.